On Media

The Washington Post's correction problem

By DYLAN BYERS

05/05/2015 01:15 PM EDT

UPDATE: Shortly after the publication of this item, The Washington Post changed the story in question from "Prisoner in van thought Gray was ‘trying to injure himself'" to "Prisoner in van heard 'banging against walls.'” The Post also added a correction regarding Donta Allen's age and updated the article to include his comments disputing the police report. We welcome those changes. Our original item follows:

Six days ago, The Washington Post published an article headlined, "Prisoner in van thought [Freddie] Gray was ‘trying to injure himself’." The article cited a police report which said that the 38-year-old prisoner who shared a police van with the now dead Baltimore native "told investigators that he could hear Gray 'banging against the walls' of the vehicle and believed that he 'was intentionally trying to injure himself.'"

The following day, the prisoner in the van, who is actually 22-years-old, told local media outlets that he never said anything of the sort. "All I did was go straight to the station, but I heard a little banging like he was banging his head," Donta Allen told WJZ, the local CBS affiliate. "They trying to make it seem like I told them that, I made it like Freddie Gray did that to himself. Why the f--- would he do that to himself?"

And yet, one week later, the Post has made no changes to its article. It has not issued a correction. It has not added a parenthetical note regarding the disputed report. Nor, for that matter, has it updated the article to account for the fact that the six police officers involved have now been charged with murder and manslaughter. When asked last week about the discrepancies between the police report and the prisoner's claims, a Post spokesperson said only: "We accurately quoted from [the police] report, which was a search warrant affidavit written by a police investigator."

This isn't the Post's only Baltimore-related flub. Two weeks ago, the paper reported that Gray's neighborhood, Sandtown-Winchester, was responsible for a majority of the state's prison inmates. "The Justice Policy Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative say that inmates from Sandtown make up a majority of Maryland’s state prison population," the article stated. The idea that a neighborhood of 9,000 could produce the majority of inmates in a state of 6 million is, of course, absurd. What the study actually found was that the Sandtown area has more people in state prison than any other census tract. This, too, has not been corrected. The Post did not immediately respond when asked about why it wasn't corrected.

But the Post's correction problems go well beyond Baltimore -- and all the way to the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on lapses at the U.S. Secret Service. Several aspects of those reports came under question, but were occasionally changed or updated without correction. In one case, the Post initially reported that two agents had left a party, ran into a barricade and “may have driven over” a package that was a part of an active bomb investigation. The Post later changed the language from “may have driven directly over” to “drove directly beside,” but never issued a correction.